Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The death throes of white privilege

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo.,
during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one
more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an
unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What
we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is
cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

Protests and looting
naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings
where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting
strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served
as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however,
because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber
bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of
respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and
governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually
driven by the most ignoble motivations.

The post-Civil War period, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s, the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency. Everyone thought this nation would improve after those things happened, but they didn't; things got worse instead. And everybody knows why that is.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a
criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six
bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of
black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus
only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted,
thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black
guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a
loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights
Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court
decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff
to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death
row for 14 years. And think of a recent study
by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when
white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers
far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more
afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive
policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes
or stop-and-frisk laws.

A friend of mine wrote this.

"America is witnessing the death throes of white privilege. It's not
going to be pretty -- it's been the operating principle of this continent
for four centuries. The indigenous people and the imported labor and
their descendants have been exceedingly polite up to this point,
considering what they've endured. To my fellow Caucasians, I suggest you
don't try to rub it in."